Catching up…
I worked too many hours this week. I had to be up during the day to meet with the contractor and TSA, and then had to be up all night while the work was going on. A typical work day last week consisted of me being up and at the airport by 9am, crashing at the hotel around 5pm, writing reports and e-mails until 7pm, arriving back at the airport by 7:30 and working until 6am. Then writing up the day’s activities and trying to get a couple hours sleep until I had to be back at the airport around 9 or 10… It’s been a rough week and I’m feeling drained in all possible ways…
I have napped at the rest stations and have drunk my weight in Mt. Dew. Nothing makes this long, tired drive bearable like AC/DC. If that band is good for nothing else, it can keep you awake with its raw simplicity. Roll down the windows and sing at the top of your lungs. I know you like more complicated arrangements, I know you like “better music”. No one’s listening, allow yourself to rock out!
I can’t wait to go to the next “blink 182″ concert and yell, “Play Freebird!!!” Awwww, too Soon?
They say you should “kill your heroes”. What if they kill themselves? The more I listen to the new Metallica CD, the more I wonder why I ever looked up to Lars Ulrich. I wanted to be him when I grew up, now I’m grown and can’t understand when he stopped giving a shit. Every performance on the new CD is phoned in. Watered down and gasping for air. I can play everything on this CD without skipping a beat and I’m not even any damn good. The CD is better than anything they’ve done in the last 20 years, but it’s still pretty weak. Cream puff metal. It looks like its solid, but it’s empty on the inside. Empty and unsatisfying.
A couple of months ago I put up a link to a recording we did for a primitive show/podcast type thing we tentatively called, The Fat Bastard Show… It was a silly show with a few of us just sitting around talking shit but that’s the same format of about half the podcasts I listen to. I put the link up there and asked you to e-mail me with comments (good and bad) and that I wanted to improve it and do it on a semi-regular basis. The overwhelming silence told me that I was in over my head and should never entertain the notion of being audibly creative ever again. I admitted defeat and shelved the thing as a failed experiment. I mean, I didn’t even get ONE e-mail telling me I suck.
I know I don’t have hundreds of people reading this but I figured at least one of you would jump at the opportunity to tell me I’m bad at something… Now, a couple of months later, at least three of you have asked me when I was going to do another show. You liked the first one and want to hear more. Where were you people when I asked for input? My fragile little ego shattered by the deafening silence and now you tell me it was worth trying to improve upon? I’m too damn sensitive for this kind of manipulation ya know… So, maybe I’ll try it again, because I really think it could be good if we got some kind of direction and some decent recording gear.
I’ll leave it to you guys. It’ll take at least four e-mails telling me that I should try again. No e-mails, no show.
The creative writing process is always feast or famine with me. Recently it has been feast, but I’ve been too damn busy at work to write any of it down. When I do have time, I’m too exhausted to concentrate. It feels like starving for a month, then killing an entire herd of buffalo and only being able to carry out 10 pounds of meat. The rest is going to waste and I desperately want to keep it all!
So this was a short session of getting caught up. A lot of the ideas I noted down or blurbed into my recorder seem unimportant now or more likely, unintelligible. Man, when I tell you I was tired this week I mean it. I haven’t been this tired even at festival or cons or even back when I used to stay up for three days at a time. I guess the age is catching up with me. Thanks for all your well-wishes, I’m still younger than most of you out there so I’ll never feel “old”. Until some of you die off, then I’ll feel REAL old, and scared, and lonely… How is it I can take a happy moment and find the disturbing elements in it? Not that aging or birthdays are difficult to find sad moments in but I’ve never been one to worry about my birthday. Good or bad, it comes and goes and we mark another year. My body sees birthdays as analog; our society sees birthdays as digital. 17 years 360 days old, you’re still not legally 18. Even though a few days won’t get you much closer. So Happy Birthday to Teresa and the dozen or so other September babies I know. September/early October seems to be a common birth month for a lot of people I know. Hmmm… What were our parents doing on New Years Eve?
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